Penny Arcade Wants To Help You Choose Your Next Game

by Theta1138August 23, 2011 at 11:00AM
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Video games are fun, but it can be hard choosing a game you'll enjoy. Even if you just like one genre, there's a big difference between, say, Borderlands and Call of Duty when it comes to first-person shooters. Fortunately, the guys at Penny Arcade want to help you take the guesswork out of it.

As an app, it's got art and design from the unhinged weirdos we've known and loved for more than a decade. Under the hood, it's actually pretty simple: the software is a recommendation engine, like you find at a shopping website. You enter in what you've played before, what you liked and didn't like, and what kind of game you happen to be looking for. The software crunches it and offers up selections you might like.

The difference between this and, say, Amazon's "recommendations" is that the Decide-o-Tron isn't limited to stuff being sold by a particular merchant. It ranges across all platforms, even ones that have been decommissioned, like the Game Boy Advance. In short, if you're looking for something in the used section, it'll still be as useful as looking at new releases.

It even includes a neat feature where you can scan the bar codes of games you own instead of typing their titles in. We're just curious about one reported flaw: apparently no matter what you enter, their game "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" is always number one. We're sure it's just a bug.